that the sale of its XRP token on exchanges and through algorithms did not constitute investment contracts. However, the institutional sale of the tokens did violate federal securities laws, the court said.
“The judge ruled that Ripple’s programmatic sale of XRP on digital asset exchanges did not constitute an unregistered offer and sale of investment contracts, but primarily because an initial unregistered offering and sale to institutional investors had already occurred that created a market,” analysts Alkesh Shah and Andrew Moss wrote.
Bank of America says it continues to differentiate between the trading of blockchain-native crypto tokens, for which regulations are still being established, and the trading of tokenized traditional assets including exchange-traded-funds , repos and gold, for which the “rules are already established and trading volumes have already reached trillions of dollars.”, as it should moderately de-risk the regulatory pressure on the stock.